Thaw & Desire: Heather Treseler’s Parturition

Ostensibly, Heather Treseler is a New England poet: she grew up near Boston and teaches in Worcester. Yet her work extends beyond the geographical and social landscape of the northeastern United States to encompass ancient Greece, New Orleans, and Missouri, reimagining, like Anne Carson in The Glass Essay, received mythology in a modern context, approaching her work with a wit and intellectualism characteristic of (though not exclusive to) the New England poetic tradition.

The subject of Treseler’s collection Parturition is the travel of desire, a terrain that leads to uncanny metaphors. She compares her decision not to have a child to hallucinatory Athenian rowers staring at their reflections in the sea after a naval battle. “I knew I was supposed to have a story,” her speaker notes, “telos of girlhood its reproducibility.”

If Carson writes of desire as a series of edges, Treseler pushes this analysis toward the essential elements: the edges of water, the edges of ice, the edges of air, practicing a rooted precision. Her close attention to formal detail, down to the length of each line and stanza, evokes Elizabeth Bishop, a poet of whom Treseler is both a student and scholar. Formal structures allow Treseler’s narrators to take surprising leaps, to counterbalance discursive thought with haiku-like reflection. Her poetic impulses, rooted in tradition but radical in vision, recall an early Adrienne Rich or, to draw from Frank Bidart’s observation, an early Robert Lowell.

The poem “Voyeur” describes a summer swim at Walden Pond: “Three women, two nude, thawing from / a New England winter so fierce it broke / records, pipes, roof rakes, vertebrae, // grim cheer in local habits of hibernation.” Here, water freezes and thaws, breaking down the edges of self, of female self. In the antipodes of New England seasons, winter and summer, water is an agent of destruction but also of recrudescence and self-discovery.

Water also figures in the poem “Caul,” which explores the rare condition of a child born with an amniotic sac around their head. In this instance, the speaker notes, the woman born in caul is “not holy or haunted” but “stirred by life’s bright brashness,” a heightened sensitivity to her surroundings:

as on an afternoon in late October, the ocher light
a famishing gold, a woman carries a harp across her back

and turns to face traffic, her profile like a Wyeth in an aqueous
meadow in Maine.

Each word signals a perceptible shift: the October light becomes a famishing gold, the woman carrying a harp becomes archetypal. I think of Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World,” a portrait of the young and disabled Anna Christina Olson crawling, reaching across an impossibly long meadow up to her house. The poem’s central image is certainly haunted by something—by Wyeth’s long relationship to the Olson family, his neighbors in Maine, or by Christina’s refusal to use a wheelchair as a degenerative muscle condition rendered her legs unable to walk.

“Caul” ends with a reflection of “what remains hidden in portage: the dearth before melody, the blind birth of song.” Absence precedes the making of art and, in Treseler’s world, birth often haunts more than death as the collection asks whether it is not also legitimate for a woman to choose to give birth to her own person, her own art. What remains hidden in portage, in the short walk across land between long stretches of water, but imaginative will?

Parturition refers to the act of giving birth, a confinement, or “to the action of bringing something into being.” Many of the poems’ titles refract this theme: nullipara refers to a woman who has not or cannot give birth, caul is the amniotic membrane that surrounds a fetus, anhedonia the inability to feel pleasure. Treseler’s playful relationship with language seems grounded in the ethics of Lorine Niedecker and the Objectivist poets, building upon everyday language and content. In “Louisiana Requiem,” the opening poem and metaphysic of the collection, a friend awaits the birth of her first child as her mother dies in hospice, a circumstance by which the narrator constructs a theory of language:

this grand
house turned palliative, which is to care for without

curing, cognate with pall and pallbearer, cloak and carrier
of the coffin before the earth’s coverlet brings the body

home to its colder self.

Pulling on the string that ties these words together, the sentence reminds us that “palliative” has more to do with death than with care. Treseler’s narrator navigates a relation to the unknowable, the lifeless body arriving beneath the “earth’s coverlet,” a sense of domesticity ruling this final moment. Death is another place for the body to rest, the subterranean earth another place in which to make a home. The narrator turns to sunlight and sea to find eros, death’s opposite. In “Shorelines,” the final poem of the collection, the speaker observes: “Whatever is the opposite of keening, that is the sound / that waves make.” The narrator counters New England stoicism with a lightheartedness, recalling Emily Dickinson’s studied flippancy as she observes the Maine coast:

Here, alongside white sand and dark wet rocks that cover
it, lovingly, lending land some provisional protection:
solidity against the inquest of water, which is a version
of time, and warmth, though it be from stones.

In a sleight of hand, water becomes time and the shoreline what generates, in part, the water’s inimitable sound as it resists the relentlessness of erosion. In three other water poems, “Skywalker,” “Seabirds” and “Weather,” the body itself is the shore or the provisional bridge, resisting the pressures of a fracturing world.

“The Lucie Odes,” the pinnacle of the collection, capitalizes on that conceit in an elegiac celebration of a deep and profound romance. In delineating the poetic form, Robert Hass has posited that we can read the ode as prayer: “It implies a psychic distance from the desired object. In one way of thinking, then, lyric is the site of an absence.” This long poem, made up of ten odes, renders the absent Lucie present, recounting her escape from sexual exploitation into a professional life in St. Louis, while delivering a prayerful tribute to a joy-filled, reclaimed life. Treseler explores the edges of desire—the moment after sex in bed, the feeling of hosting a perfect dinner party at your beloved’s side, the admiration for another woman’s escape from an abusive past and chronic pain: “Both of us learning to act / from half-wrecked bodies: my accident / a small occasion beside your catastrophe, // paralysis, metal chair.”

Elsewhere in the collection, Treseler writes of bodies as hinges, bodies as nations, and the act of birth as splitting the body in two. Lucie’s body—in bed, in her wheelchair, in the car—is literally split in half between paralyzed and unparalyzed states. Questions of selfhood and autonomy, nostalgia and time circulate in this poem about a beloved: any reckoning of the present requires an Eliotic confrontation with the past, with the future and its absences.

Traveling between water and desire, the mortal body and the shore, Treseler plumbs the spaces between concrete coordinates of time and place. In these poems, she reinvents an expansive New England imaginary as a force that necessarily takes us elsewhere, and allows us to be “momently carried across / into somewhere, something, someone else.”